where the two cultures meet

Greek Origins

The first signs of human civilisation in Europe are from Thera, on the Aegean island of Akrotiri, now called Santorini.Excavations have revealed early Minoan settlements and a golden ibis, remains from a catastrophic volcanic eruption there, now dated as 1590BC. Some say that Plato’s description of Atlantis was based on this eruption.The catastrophe led to the beginning of the Mycenaean civilisation of Ancient Greece, lasting from 1590 to 1100BCIn the 1300BC citadel at Mycenae there are frescoes of two chariots typical of these times.Online, August 2 2017AD, Nature magazine published I. Lazaridis et al’s evidence for the Genetic Origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. They studied genome data from 19 ancient individuals including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia.

The work shows that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus and Iran. Their abstract continues: The Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe or Armenia. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Lazaridis’s work supports the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.